I stood in the hallway outside the operating rooms at Methodist in Houston while Theresas husband Bob set down his vending-machine coffee and said, Gina, Joyce is not the one you need to worry about.
Then he told me what Theresa had planned to tell me herself, after her surgery, so it would not frighten me beforehand.
Joyce, my ex-husbands seventy-nine-year-old mother, was not staging a takeover. She was confused. Her memory had been slipping for months, and in her mind she still lived with the family, and somehow she had turned up at my new bungalow believing it was home. Theresa, who had my code to feed Biscuit, had found Joyce on my porch disoriented and let her inside rather than leave an old woman standing in the street, meaning to sort it out once she was through her own operation.
The one to worry about was my ex-husband, Mark. Theresa had learned he was asking around town about my new house and what I paid for it and whether his mothers name could be put on anything. He had been nudging his failing mother toward my door on purpose, hoping that if Joyce was found living there, he could muddy whose house it was.
The Austin police were gentle with Joyce, exactly as they promised. They did not treat a frightened old woman like a burglar. They called her a proper caregiver and got her somewhere safe, and Biscuit was fine, wagging through the whole thing.
A confused grandmother was not my enemy. The son using her confusion as a crowbar was.
My house is mine, four hundred forty-seven thousand dollars of my own half and my own savings, my name alone on the deed, and no amount of Marks whispering changes a recorded document. A lawyer made that very clear to him, in writing, and he went quiet.
Theresa came through her surgery just fine. When she was strong enough I sat by her bed and thanked her for taking in a lost old woman and for watching my back even on her way into an operating room. That is a friend. Joyce is getting the care she actually needs now, which is more than her own son ever arranged. And I gave my key to exactly one person again. The same one. Theresa.